IB World Religions 1.9.4. How Do We Get There? the Five Great Vows, Asceticism and Kevala Notes

1.9.4. How Do We Get There? The Five Great Vows, Asceticism and Kevala

The three jewels

1. Jains gather the path into three requirements held together, the ratnatraya or three jewels: right faith (samyak darshana), right knowledge (samyak jnana) and right conduct (samyak charitra).
2. The Tattvartha Sutra opens by stating that these three together are the way to liberation. Jains stress the word together, since none of the three is held to work on its own.
3. Right faith means seeing reality as it is, and above all seeing that jiva and ajiva are separate things. This is the reversal of the wrong belief that keeps a soul bound.
4. Right knowledge is the accurate understanding that grows from that vision, learned from scripture and from mendicant teachers. Right conduct puts both into practice, and it is where the vows and austerities belong.

The five great vows

1. The core of right conduct is a set of five vows, the mahavratas or great vows, which Jain monks and nuns take without limit or exception.
2. They are ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (taking nothing that is not given), brahmacharya (celibacy) and aparigraha (non-attachment to possessions). Jains trace four of them to Parshvanatha and hold that Mahavira added brahmacharya.
3. Each vow is kept in three ways and by three means. A mendicant neither does the act, nor causes another to do it, nor approves of it when done, in thought, in word and in deed.
4. Aparigraha decides how much a mendicant may own. Svetambara mendicants keep a few items such as robes, a bowl and a brush, while senior Digambara monks hold that any possession compromises the vow and keep nothing.
5. The vows are not experienced as rules imposed from outside. Since Jains hold that karma sticks to the soul through passion, the vows are described as the conditions under which the passions find nothing to work on.

Ahimsa in daily life

1. Ahimsa is the first vow, and Jains treat it as the principle the other four serve. The maxim they use is ahimsa paramo dharma, non-violence is the highest duty.
2. Because souls are held to fill the world, ahimsa reaches past human beings to animals, plants and the one-sensed lives in earth, water, fire and air.
3. Jains grade harm and organize life to reduce it. Vegetarianism is standard, many avoid root vegetables, drinking water is boiled or filtered and many finish eating before dark.
4. For the four months of the monsoon, a period called chaturmas, mendicants stop travelling and settle in one town, since wet ground swarms with life that walking would crush.
5. Ahimsa also governs speech and thought. Jains connect it to anekantavada, many-sidedness, arguing that insisting your own view is the whole truth does a kind of violence to someone else's.
6. The principle has public effects. Jain communities maintain panjrapole, shelters for old and injured animals, and Gandhi credited the Jain teacher Shrimad Rajchandra with shaping his own commitment to non-violence.

The twelve lay vows

1. Lay Jains take the same five vows in a limited form, the anuvratas or lesser vows, scaled to a life with a family and an occupation.
2. A layperson does not promise never to harm any living thing, a vow no farmer or trader could keep. The promise is to avoid deliberate harm to beings with more than one sense and to reduce the rest as far as possible.
3. Around these five the tradition builds a scheme of twelve vows for householders. Three gunavratas limit the scope of activity, setting bounds on travel, on consumption and on harm that serves no purpose.
4. Four shikshavratas are disciplines of practice: periods of meditation (samayika), days spent under monastic-style restraint (paushadha), further limits on movement, and the giving of food and necessities to mendicants.
5. Together the twelve build a life leaning toward renunciation without leaving the world, and many lay Jains take them formally in front of a teacher.
6. Some householders tighten the vows in later life and a few go on to full renunciation, so the two ways of life form one continuum rather than two categories.

Tapas and kevala

1. Tapas, austerity, is what drives nirjara, the wearing away of karma already bound to the soul. Jains divide it into external and internal forms.
2. External tapas works on the body: fasting, eating less than hunger asks, restricting which foods are taken, giving up comforts and holding difficult postures.
3. Internal tapas works on the mind: confession, humility, service, study, meditation and detachment from the body. Jains treat these forms as the more important, since karma binds through passion and passion is a condition of the mind.
4. When conduct and austerity have destroyed the four karmas that cover the soul's own qualities, Jains say a person attains kevala jnana, complete and unobstructed knowledge.
5. Such a person is a kevalin, also called an arihant, and still has a body and a lifespan to finish. Mahavira is said to have attained kevala after more than twelve years of austerity and to have taught for thirty years afterwards.

Paryushana and pratikramana

1. The path shows in the calendar as well as in the monastery. Paryushana for Svetambaras and Das Lakshana for Digambaras concentrate a year of practice into eight or ten days of fasting, scripture and restraint.
2. Pratikramana, the formal review and confession of faults, is performed then and, by observant Jains, far more often. Fasting runs alongside it, and long fasts completed during Paryushana are honoured publicly.
3. Pratikramana ends by asking forgiveness of all living beings. On the closing day of Paryushana that request is made in person, and now by message across the world, with the words micchami dukkadam.
4. Lay Jains also practise dana, giving food and necessities to mendicants, which the tradition treats as supporting the path itself rather than as charity.
5. The three jewels hold the answer together. Jains hold that a person gets there by seeing correctly, knowing accurately and acting with restraint, and that nobody can do any of it on another's behalf.